Posture estimation using structure and motion models

Sensing of human motion is very important for human-computer interactive applications such as virtual reality, gesture recognition, and communication. A vision system is suitable for human-computer interaction since this involves passive sensing and the system can estimate the motion of the user without any discomfort for the user. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for fast posture estimation of the user from an image sequence by using the position information of the hands and head. Our algorithm is founded on a model based method. The parameters of a geometric model are calculated from human kinematics. It is inadequate to obtain a unique solution from the image information such as position of the head and hands. The unknown parameters are predicted by the motion models and the previous posture parameters, then the unknown parameters are adjusted by a minimization method.

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